In his compassionate and deeply thought-provoking book Together: The Healing Power of Human Connection in a Sometimes Lonely World, Vivek Murthy makes clear that nearly everyone is lonely at some point in their life but one of the cruel tricks of loneliness is making you think you’re the only one who is lonely. You are suffering through an almost universal experience yet believe everyone around you feels connected to others. The truth is that if you are lonely—whether it’s a longtime state or a fleeting feeling brought on by a particular situation—others near you probably are, too.
Loneliness often accompanies grief. If you are already lonely when grief hits, your loneliness may be compounded. We don’t tend to talk about either loneliness or grief, and by not talking about these outlaw emotions, we fail to develop not only our skills for talking about them but our ability to tolerate them in ourselves and others. When we see grief or loneliness heading toward us, we hurry to slam the door and lock them out.
We label people who are grieving downers and we urge them to “move on,” “get back to normal,” or cheer up. But being told to move on or cheer up just makes me feel lonely—it’s proof that the person talking to me doesn’t get it. When someone has told me to move on or cheer up, not once have I felt less alone, and more importantly perhaps, not once have I gotten closer to moving on or cheering up.
While I find those comments completely unhelpful and even alienating, I feel for the people making them. I think they are afraid. The next time someone says something like that to me, I hope I have the presence of mind to respond with, “I’m afraid of grief, too.”
It’s not just fear at work, though. I think people equate taking time with grief to a lack of effort or activity, as if the hard work of grieving has no value.
In a culture obsessed with productivity, taking time to grieve seems wasteful. It appears to be “doing nothing.” We think activity is inherently valuable while doing nothing is inherently lazy, but in fact, the opposite is often true. One of my favorite Buddhist sayings reminds me of the folly of taking action in lieu of reflecting: “Don’t just do something, stand there.”
I guess you could say that in my grief process, I’ve done a lot of standing there. I have chosen not to distract myself with activity and instead to turn towards my grief and give it space. I’ve been a downer. And yet, more often than not, when I’ve talked about my grief with others, they’ve reciprocated in authentic and vulnerable ways. Being a downer and standing there with my grief rather than hurrying through it has become a connecting point between me and others.
Often standing there with my grief is difficult. For example, last week I took something off my calendar that was a reminder of the life I had with my husband before he died. Date night dancing showed up every Saturday on my calendar. Taking it off my calendar was the easy part. The hard part, the real work, has been sitting with the hard hollow that forms in my throat every time I see the empty space on Saturday on my calendar. Even harder has been not pushing past those tough feelings with distractions but rather sitting with them, feeling them, acknowledging them, turning toward them.
Standing there with someone else who is grieving means holding space for them, not trying to cheer them up or fix their grief. That person in front of you who is grieving feels lonely and thinks they’re the only person feeling it. But they aren’t. You feel it or have felt it. I know you have. Don’t just do something—stand there.